Oddly enough, I wouldn't include your post in my rail against arguing with crazy people. I think you're not seeing the larger picture, but that's not crazy. Maybe it's the contrast with SDAI-Tech1....

Your present wage is a relative thing. Under the present conditions it's unlikely to be what it would've been just a few years ago. Wages scale across an economy, and removing a floor like the minimum wage will have an effect reaching pretty high up the wage ladder. Eliminating the minimum wage will have an impact on you personally.

Even worse is the possibility of initiating a race to the bottom, a runaway spiral down the drain. I hope you won't call me a commie for pointing out that free-market capitalism is prone to bubbles and collapses and irrational exuberance, as well as irrational pessimism. It can happen, often in a stagflation situation, that all the incentives favor a crash in wages.

The argument for repealing the minimum wage is primarily based on fear, that The World (As We Know It) Will End --Tomorrow-- well, surely, it'll end someday, if businesses are forced to pay a living wage to their employees even if the market would allow starvation wages.

But get real. How long has there been a minimum wage? Somehow American businesses have survived it, and they always will. They piss and moan and shriek and snivel and send briefcases of cash to Republican politicians who run around in front of the cameras with their hair on fire shrieking "socialism! socialism! Aieeeee" and stir up the teabagging wretches to pick up their pitch forks and fix their bayonets...and it's all bullshit.

You underestimate business people. They know that it's a Darwinian world and that they have to adapt themselves to fit their environment (after expending millions on lobbyists to try to change the environment), and if the environment includes incentives to maintain the society in which they operate at a decent standard of living, that's just what they'll do. Conversely, take away the constraints and the incentives, and all hell breaks loose, not because business people are evil, but simply because they're responding to the constraints or lack thereof of their environment. In the large, businesspeople are a gas expanding to fill the available volume.

Adam Smith didn't predict anything and he didn't prescribe anything, he only described how things had been done up to his time. Respecting that doesn't mean we're forbidden from adapting how we do business to suit the times, and for the greatest good for the greatest number. Adam Smith's model didn't account for an integrated global market and microsecond communication times and the electronic flow of capital and the virtualization of increasing amounts of economic activity. We've learned a bit since 1775.